Chapter Twenty-Eight – Stephanie

 

Leaning down over the desk with my shoulders hunched, I twirled the phone cord up around my finger, idly wondering about the little things we might have lost by going over to cell phones. Dependability, for sure. And something to do with your hands while you were on a long call.

“A couple hours?” I asked Jeff on the other end of the phone. I’d explained everything to him, brought him as completely up to speed as I could, despite how many questions I still had bouncing around in my own head.

“Maybe less,” he said, but the tone of his voice sounded iffy. “But bet on two.” He paused again. “You really think this is gonna work? Think we’re gonna be able to, I dunno, put things back the way they were?”

I sighed long and deeply. “God, I hope so.”

“How about you?” he asked as I stared down at the desk, at the big ledger book opened up in front of me. “You doing all right?”

“Other than having my entire understanding of the world shaken to its core, you mean? Or the whole thing?”

He chuckled. “Pretty wild, right?”

Idly, my eyes traveled down the list of names. It was a fresh book, from the looks of it. Esther must have been preparing for the festival. I ran down the list, surprised to see only a dozen or so names. One of them, about halfway through, was even marked off in fresh-looking ink. Chad Ivers, the guy we’d locked in Christina’s guest room.

Biting my lower lip and smiling a little, I ran my finger under the last name on the list: Ryder Williams. His tight signature was just like him. Regimented, careful, no bullshit. Just a little scrawl of lettering that made me picture him in my mind’s eye.

“Still there?” Jeff asked, jogging me back from my thoughts of the sexy veteran who’d wandered into my life.

I glanced up.

Ryder stood in the hallway leading to the bar, just leaning against the wall with his arms crossed as he watched me. He smiled, but the smile looked a little forced. Even from that distance, though, those dark eyes of his turned my knees to jelly.

What was it about this man in front of me that was so damned attractive? “See you in a couple hours, then?” I asked, brushing my hair back behind my ear, looking back down to the desk, to the ledger in front of me. Suddenly feeling a little guilty at prying into Esther’s business, I shut the book with a certain finality.

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “See you then.”

We both hung up.

“How’s he doing?” Ryder asked as he crossed the little lobby to me. Arms crossed, he leaned down and planted his elbows on the ledge in front of me. It was clear he hadn’t shaved since the day before, and his shadow was coming in. “Charm still working?”

Just having him alone in the room with me was enough to make my heart flutter. The muscles, the strong jaw line, those dreamy eyes of his that seemed to draw me in like they were magnets and I was made of metal.

He leaned forward a little bit farther, bringing himself closer to me.

Chin uplifted, my eyes gazing into Ryder’s, I drew closer to him. “Far as he can tell.”

“He’ll be able to drive it, then?” he asked as he leaned forward, tongue licking his dry lips a little.

Lips slightly parted, I nodded. “Yep. Two hours, and he’ll be here.”

“Good,” he said, his eyes flickering from mine, down to my lips. “The three of us’ll leave from here. He makes the circle while we go in and deal with Marguerite.”

We inched closer towards each other, and the heat from his lips seemed to radiate out to mine. “I need to tell you something,” I said, my voice a little breathless.

“I need to tell you something, too,” he said in a raspy imitation of his normal voice.

“What’s that?” I asked, my eyes closing, a little smile growing on my lips. Nothing he could tell me would change how I felt about him.

“No, you first,” he breathed.

Our lips pressed together, not giving me a chance to reply. Not that I wanted to. I’d seen the way he’d reacted to Esther going along with him. I knew he was going to be pissed with what I’d decided, had known he’d be angry since the moment I’d made my decision back in the hotel bar.

But it was my life, and my town. Not his.

The fact that I was holding back my secret didn’t diminish the fire that spread through me. I knew it was wrong not to tell him yet, but it still didn’t change the way I felt as his hands came up, running through my hair, or the feel of the tips of his fingers as they brushed my cheek, or the side of my neck. Didn’t change the taste of the scotch on his tongue, or the smell of his skin as we continued to kiss, his bristly upper lip rubbing across mine. To kiss like it was the last kiss we’d ever have.

If the first time we’d touched lips had been enough to make time stop, this had been enough to cease the world from spinning. Everything seemed to hang in that moment, with even the dust particles in the air not wanting to fall or falter or drift as we clung to each over the old front desk of the Camelot High Street Hotel.

Gasping a little, we finally broke apart.

I blinked my eyes up at him, and he did the same back at me, the moment still holding onto us like tendrils of a spiderweb we’d accidentally stepped through. My skin seemed to burn where his hands had just been, seemed to ache for his touch.

We looked into each other’s eyes, both smiling a little.

It seemed as good a time as any for me to break the news that I was going with the truck. “I’m going with Jeff.”

To him, it must have seemed just as good a time to drop his own bombshell. “I’m not human.”

“What?” we both asked at the same time, gasping as we stepped back from the desk like it had just burst into flames between us.

My chest constricted, and my stomach sank as I turned away from him, my arms wrapped around my body. Had he just said what I thought he’d said?

“You can’t go with him,” he said. “It’s too dangerous!”

A shiver shook my whole body, traveling up from my toes to the top of my head, and back again. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. Not human? What did that even mean? What had I just been kissing?

No, this couldn’t be true. Ryder was just as human as I was. He felt warm, and he was funny, and he laughed, and he felt good in my arms. He’d said the words, though, hadn’t he?

“Why do you want to go with him?” Ryder asked, his voice louder than before. “Why? Because you think you pulled the trigger once, so you can do it again?”

My shoulders tightened. “Not human?” I whispered, shaking my head. “Not human?”

“Stephanie,” he said, his voice softer than just a moment ago. “I-I-I’ve been trying to tell you. I’ve been wanting to tell you.” The hair on his jaw scuffed audibly against the palm of his hand. “Since yesterday. Since I first met you. I even tried to right before we saw the picture of Winifred and realized how much like Esther she looked.”

I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. I couldn’t face this man who wasn’t even a man. Couldn’t let him see the tears welling up in my eyes. I couldn’t believe I’d been stupid enough to think about him being more than just some guy. That I’d been dumb enough to believe there could be something more here.

I whispered a question, barely loud enough for even me to hear.

“A shifter,” he replied.

My shoulders scrunched more tightly together at the realization of his actually hearing me. The tears began to roll from the corners of my eyes, leaving trails down my cheeks as I took in a shaky breath. I squeezed my eyes tightly, tried to banish them with a shake of my head, tried telling myself I didn’t need to waste tears on someone who’d lied to me this whole time. I wouldn’t have wasted them on a man who’d done the same thing, so why then on a monster?

“That’s what I am,” he continued, answering my softly spoken question, his footfalls sounding as he walked around the desk. “I’m a panther, and only silver bullets will hurt me. I turn into one, a full-on giant panther.” He took another step, a slow one that seemed to move with the inevitability of history itself as his heel slowly touched down on the carpet. His silent presence loomed behind me, an unseen shadow that rose at my back.

“Don’t, Ryder,” I said, a sob creeping into my voice as I stuck a hand out towards him. “Just. Don’t.”

He stopped in his tracks, his indecision palpable in the air.

I needed to get away from him. Head down, I turned and swept past him, the floor swimming through my tears as I refused to look him in the eyes.

Ryder reached out, his fingers brushing my shoulders. “Stephanie?” All the gruffness was scrubbed from his voice, leaving only a raw hurt.

I ducked my shoulder, contorted my body as I slunk away from his fingers, and went back around the desk towards the stairs.

He groaned as I walked quickly through the lobby.

Somehow, that little sound of dejection and rejection stabbed my heart. I sobbed again as more tears began to flow down my checks. Desperately, I tried to wipe them from my face, swallowing, my lips quivering.

“Stephanie?” he asked my back as I set foot on the first step. “Stephanie, don’t do this. Talk to me, please!”

I turned my head just a little, but didn’t look back at him. I wasn’t sure if it was the tears in my eyes, or the hurt in the core of my being at this betrayal, but the will wouldn’t muster inside me as the exhaustion of the last two days suddenly seeped into every pore of my being. All I could do was look where my hand tightly gripped the old, unpolished wooden banister, at my knuckles whitening under the strain.

“Stephanie?” he asked again, his voice closer now.

“I’m still going with Jeff,” I said, my words flat.

He came a step closer. “Can we talk about this?”

I stuck out my hand again behind my back. “There’s nothing to talk about, Ryder. I believe you’re a good person.” I paused, chuckling dryly despite my general lack of humor at this whole thing. At having been lied to. At having been seduced by some kind of monster. “Scratch that. I believe you’re good. Person is up for debate.”

“Steph—”

“No,” I said, my voice colder than it had ever been. Colder than even my heart felt at that moment. “I think you can save this town. As soon as you’re done with that, though, I don’t want to see you again.”

He sighed the most pained sigh I’d ever heard. Enough to almost crack the frost forming around my heart, to soften the rock-hard organ Ryder’s betrayal had formed.

“You don’t really mean that, do you?” he asked.

I didn’t say anything. Just turned my face back to the stairs, took another step.

“Do you, Stephanie?” he asked.

“Fuck you, Ryder,” I said, the words leaving my mouth with more weariness and disappointment than any tinge of anger. “Just…fuck you.”